I used other Fediverse platforms since about 2022 and was keen to find one that replicated a more reddit-like style.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
I moved to Korea and started posting on r/Korea. I recorded a video of a big fire in Seoul, and because I couldn't find any news about it I uploaded it to my peertube instance and linked it on r/Korea.
The mods banned me for promoting my own website and said I should have uploaded it to YouTube.
So that resource was gone which was a bummer for me who just moved across the world and didn't speak Korean. That was my main reason to use reddit.
I already hosted mastodon and when the 3rd party amargeddon happened I heard about Lemmy. I was hoping that there would be a vibrant Korea community which never happened.
But somehow the UX is much better than on mastodon so I stayed. Later I switched the software from Lemmy to PieFed though.
I quit Reddit many years ago, because I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health. Then I was on Mastodon for a few years. Lemmy started to exist in that timeframe and the premise sounded good, so I joined pretty early on, when there were only a handful of posts every week or so. But yeah, these days Mastodon is what I check only occasionally and this place has taken over, as I do like the format a lot more.
Not to go too deep into politics but I’ve been banned from every social media platform (including Reddit!) for being vehemently anti fascist and anti capitalist.
I have some uh… opinions… about how to initiate change and they don’t involve peaceful marching with signs in circles and going home. Because we’ve done that for decades now and things are only getting worse and the capitalists are only solidifying their power especially with how fast technology is moving. We’re running out of time to overthrow these bastards before they make it impossible…
But anyways, those opinions aren’t allowed anywhere else and barely tolerated here (got banned from world after expressing my thoughts about Luigi). Too subversive and threatening I guess.
Being an anarchist is tough, it feels like online everyone hates you and accuses you of playing for the other team at least in American politics. As an anarchist I hate both teams who have the same fucking owners.
Bro you ain't even got to radical... Any normal person asking common sense questions will be banned in reddit.
You either engage as mods see fit, or you are removed.
I have been banned for providing links to Wikipedia debunking bad posts or comments.
With that being said, .world news and politics subs operate the same. There is a large group of Lemmy users who continue proepr discussions in meme subs because they are all banned from there lol
Bootlickers and regime whores for ya
The revolution will not be televised nor discussed in appropriate forums but will instead be memed!
Fuckers!
Btw I got banned from world by stating the fact that joe Lieberman (former US democratic senator from CT) single-handedly killed the single payer option that was originally part of obamacare because he was bribed (excuse me, political donations that are legal because corporations are people and that’s their free speech 🙄) to do so since most of the insurance companies at the time were based in his state. Linked to substantial evidence (his own fucking words!). Got banned. Libs fucking hate it when you call them out on their liberal bullshit.
Their official phone app was, and still is, garbage. So I used a 3rd party app.
When Reddit killed API access, they did it in such a way that it killed that entire ecosystem abruptly. I'd have happily paid a small fee for API access to continue using the site, but no such option existed. Even at this point I'd still do it but that option still isn't there in a way that's useful.
After that, I found out that the 3rd party app i liked the most, Sync (on Android), had a Lemmy version. So I downloaded it to try it out. And here I am.
I got temp banned for saying antizionist things, while I was banned I began to look for an open source alternative which lead me here. Early on I used .world but after finding out about Blahaj Lemmy I switched :3
Joined about a year or two before the reddit API fiasco.
- I really don't like ads+tracking and didn't want my posts supporting a company like reddit
- I'm an advocate of FOSS
- reddit has inherent pressures to censor content based on mass media pressure and profit, and to permit anti-social far right trolls
- reddit punishes proxy users, where many instances here allow me to protect myself while posting here
- didn't like the new reddit layout - even before I came here, I was lurking for a year or two on alternate frontends
- I believed federation was a good strategy at building a better reddit alternative
But also, it actually had some communities at the time. If it were more dead, or unfederated, I'm not sure if I would have put as much effort in building communities.
I got banned for inciting violence for saying Monty Williams should invest all the money he stole from Detroit back into the city and then promptly be killed with hammers as a sort of ritual sacrifice to cleanse Little Caesars Arena of his bad juju. It was just a joke and had lots of upvotes but guess it hurt a mods feelings.
Reddit being ass
I wanted to keep using Sync for Reddit and or Boost for Reddit, both clients were built for Lemmy now (as of this message Sync is quite broken though).
Even when I can keep using Sync for Reddit patched with Revanced I truly enjoy using clients such as Voyager (I missed Apollo a lot when I went from iOS to Android) and Summit, Eternity is a good alternative too.
IMHO Summit stands the best because it is the smoothest and behaves almost as good as Sync for Reddit did in its prime.
I found out about Lemmy when the api thing happened but since Infinity was still working, I stayed. But because I like open source stuff and I wanna be part of the fediverse and support it, I joined Lemmy.
I already quit many corporate social media platforms in the years before, switching to decentralized alternatives for some of them (Mastodon mainly), but was still active on Reddit somehow. Then during the Reddit blackout protest, it was as good a time as any to check out and switch to Lemmy. Its downsides for me are also part of the upside: there is no endless scrolling to be done.
It was a new technology that had released and I was keeping up with its progress. I didn’t use it super religiously until Reddit banned a bunch of leftist subreddits around 2020 though because the user base was still pretty small.
First came over with the API Reddit thing but realized Reddit is way better and Lemmy had zero content so I just went back as many did.
Then I got super into selfhosting and read a comment or post on that sub that asked why is the selfhosting sub not self hosted but thedonald is? That made me realize I thought Reddit was dumb and lemmy was my future. Now I try to invest in all selfhosted things
I installed it alongside mastadon, and Lemmy was mode usable than mastadon
I installed Lemmy, hoping it'll be a good alternative
So what made you install Lemmy
If you interact with a website through an app, you are ceding both functionality and power. Angry Birds is an app, Signal is an app, Reddit and Lemmy are websites with URLs and you are duplicating the function of a browser if you use anything else.
I'd heard of Lemmy (and Raddle) since the late 2010s, and put them in the "things I'd like to pivot to at some point" category. The main subreddit that I posted on (a transgressive mix of edgy, caring, partisan, and weird) was quarantined and then finally banned in 2020. As a result I quit using reddit altogether, but after a few months I poked around and realized people from that sub had started a forked instance of Lemmy as a refuge.
The one thing that's lackluster is the search function. Everything else is superior.
Left reddit for /kbin.
/kbin slowly decomposed.
Landed on Voyager as it was similar to RiF.
I finally lost patience with almost every interaction on Reddit becoming a knife fight. No other platform I use(d) is like that. I'd post something, reply to something, or whatever and invariably someone would be needlessly aggressive and hostile. Any attempts to engage on anything beyond a surface level were either mocked or misunderstood ("it's not that deep bro" - get out of here with that attitude). In general it was socially exhausting and I was tired of it.
I've not found that's the case here, so this is what I use instead.
I guessed Reddit's trajectory would only go (mostly) downhill. I say mostly, because a few new features are useful, like comment searching. Awards are also back. Stayed in Lemmy because the community is more focused
Early last year I decided I wanted to join social media so I'd periodically look up lists of different social media websites and I joined the ones I vibed with. Lemmy was on one of those lists. I've been having such a great time so far! 😃
Happy new year and welcome to Lemmy!
TL:DR; Reddit sucked, I got bored when it was offline. Lemmy has similar moderation BUT a transparent modlog. Post grouping, more niche communities I'd like to see.
I had first heard about Mastodon in early 2022, but since I wasn't into Twitter-style posting I kind of forgot about it and moved on.
The quality of discussions I was having on Reddit had noticeably declined over the years, and top posts were bots posting reposts, and the top comments under those posts started to become straight up copied from past top comments.
Compact mode got turned off, and later the apps had an outage in March 2023, so it was actually out of boredom when I had stumbled across Lemmy for the first time. It was a tiny thing of around a few hundred active users across all sites then.
API pricing scandal happened a few months later, my distaste for Reddit increased and simultaneously Lemmy's popularity exploded. So for June I made it my transition period to convince others to join, and in July I made my farewell post, swearing never to post or comment on Reddit ever again. I peek into Reddit on occasion but Lemmy had fully replaced my Reddit habit by September.
Conversations here have been far more lively, nuanced, mature. It doesn't always happen, as there are immature clowns and trolls here like anywhere, but we have reasonable people who are able to have a productive conversation while having positions at odds with each other. This virtually never happened on Reddit.
Tip for you, there are some types of comments allowed on some communities but banned or frowned upon on others. If you get a comment removed, check the modlog, filtering for your username as to why it may be. It may feel like censorship or power tripping, but at least it is more open and transparent. You can make an account on another server or post on different communities, if it's simply a matter of differing philosophies with the controlling admins.
I'd want to see grouping features of communities, and also there are a number of bounties on features that would be great to see. Development isn't fast so I just have to be patient. More niche topics would be cool to have.
Banned for a stupid reason from Reddit. I made a joke that a mod from r/entertainment didn’t like and got banned. I kept accidentally commenting on the subreddit because I often comment on posts without checking subreddit. Even though I had muted and blocked r/entertainment it kept popping up on my feed because it’s a general subreddit. Got banned from Reddit for trying to circumvent the ban.
I was part of the reddit exodus over the 3rd party app bullshit. I saw a post from one of the bigger servers bitching about how you shouldn't join lemmygrad or Hexbear because they are full of tankies so I made a Lemmygrad account. After Hexbear refederated I added a few of their comms and realized I jive more with their community than with Lemmygrad so I made a HB account and added a bunch of my old Lemmygrad comms to that.
I wish the hobby comms were more active. That's really the only reason I still have my reddit account.